If you want to prevent abortions, educate the girls

In my article Hope for humanity, I wrote about one of the trends I see as hope for a sustainable future for the human race. That trend is a slowing of the growth in population. People who track population trends have noticed that it took 13 years for humans to add the 7th billion, longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6th billion. In other words, we've reached peak population growth rates and now that rate is declining, slowing down. This is good news and came to us more than two years ago.

Researchers also asked what could cause this trend. It wasn't war or disease or an increasing trend in disasters. The decline in the human population is caused by education. As girls and young women get educated, they figure out that they too can have a career. They're delaying child rearing to get planted in a career. They also learn sex education and learn how they can get pregnant and how to avoid it until they're good and ready. They begin to realize, for the first time in human history, that they have rights just like men.

So if girls and young women are educated, they learn to avoid unwanted pregnancies and they learn to delay gratification for that "right guy". If they're lucky, they find him and go on to have a happy family life and a career. Hopefully, they learn to live a more sustainable life.

I find all of this in contrast to what we hear from religious conservatives. In our own Congress, they want to cut education funding, particularly for sex education. In that same Congress, those same men seek to regulate reproductive rights for women. They want to make it harder for women to acquire birth control medication and abortion services.

Around certain parts of the world, particularly where religions play a big part in government, we see the same thing. There is a concerted effort among Islamic and Christian conservatives to limit female access to information and education. Isn't it interesting that both of them are Abrahamic religions, coming from the same parent theology?

It's almost like they know that if we educate girls and women, they will stop procreating and that could mean the end of the human race. I don't think that is going to happen. But I must say, that the following meme seems appropriate to show you at this point:

Would religious conservatives ever admit that education is the best way to prevent abortions? Seems to me that an ounce of education is worth much more than a pound of cure. Let's hope that someday, they get the courage to admit that they know the solution so that we can get on with the business of building a sustainable future.